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Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

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Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#321

Post by qingcharles »

swozey wrote: post #23
baz00 wrote: post #3

Hopefully I can turn it off. I do not know anyone who uses RCS who didn't end up on WhatsApp or Telegram pretty quickly afterwards.

Why would you turn it off? What if you hire a contractor for some work and they need to send you pictures/video from an Android? Or a realtor, mechanic, craigslist seller, or just someone you don't have/want a personal relationship with. You're not adding these people to WhatsApp/Telegram.. I have probably hundreds more phone contacts than people I have on whatsapp.

If you can't afford a data plan then it just essentially blocks all your incoming/outgoing messages when it enables itself.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#322

Post by qingcharles »

whoopdedo wrote: post #62

Is there a sunset timeline for SMS? No service lasts forever and if Apple knows carriers will want to turn it off sometime they'd have to get on board with the RCS sooner rather than too late.

They can't sunset it until the networks include unlimited data for free in your plan, otherwise you would never be able to receive any messages.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#323

Post by PrimeMcFly »

wolverine876 wrote: post #307
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally know multiple people who refuse to text green bubbles, to the point of refusing dates from people who have Android. Those people don't sound like people worth knowing. Ignorant and judgy to say the least.

Life isn't so simple. What if that person is your boss or your client, or someone you love?

I mean the comment I replied to mentioned refusing dates from people with green text bubbles.

If it's a boss or someone I love and they want to ignore my messages that's on them. If it's a work issue possibly HR could be involved as discrimination or outright ignoring messages based on device wouldn't really fly.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#324

Post by JohnFen »

ok_dad wrote: post #139
lxgr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that really a concern in the US? WhatsApp and iMessage require data plans, and as far as I can remember these have largely included unlimited SMS as well. It was definitely a factor in the EU, though: SMS still aren't free on many prepaid plans there. WhatsApp was the first popular application supporting unlimited messaging on mobile phones for many.

Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls. Then they moved to a few hundred minutes free and the new SMS system cost a few cents per text. Then it was like 1500min/100sms free. Eventually it became unlimited minutes and texts but data cost some cents per kb or mb, then eventually that ratcheted up to “unlimited” everything with some “reasonable limits”. As a kid I used to make a collect call to my mom and…

> Back in my day, you used to pay per minute for calls.

Hello, fellow graybeard!

This is something I pull out every once in a while to let kids these days know how rough we had it: we had to pay 10-25 cents per minute for any in-state phone calls that weren't "local", where "local" was an arbitrary boundary on the map not even related to area code.

If we had to call out of state, charges started at $1 per minute. Every year at Christmas, we'd have an event where the local family would gather to make phone calls to out-of-state family. Because the cost was so high, we had to strictly ration time. Each kid (I was a kid then) got 3 minutes talk time.

This was late '70s/early '80s, and the figures are not adjusted for inflation.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#325

Post by ephimetheus »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #230
throw0101a wrote: post #33

> Breaking: Apple will support RCS - the green bubble shame set to end Note that the green bubble could be kept for other reasons: RCS is a major improvement over SMS/MMS, but there could still be functionality that isn't on par with a completely in-house system like 'iMessage'. The green/blue distinction may still be useful for setting certain expectations on how things work.

If carriers can charge per RCS message like they do with SMS/MMS, usually after X amount used a month, Apple needs to make it a different color from iMessages which they provide for free. People have to know if they are using free iMessages when talking to other people or if they are using up their SMS/MMS/RCS quota. Edit: Maybe charging for SMSs is not a thing in your country but it is in mine. If I see a green bubb…

Or if you frequently message people in other countries where they charge you who knows what

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#326

Post by pseudalopex »

threeseed wrote: post #134
tapoxi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a new IETF standard Google has been implementing. It's up to Apple to adopt it. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/

> RFC - Proposed Standard (July 2023) Proposed. And it's both ridiculous and sad that in 2023 we are going to see a messaging standard without E2EE built into the spec.

TLS and SSH are Proposed Standards also. The next step is Internet Standard. HTTP was promoted to Internet Standard last year.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#327

Post by nielsbot »

criddell wrote: post #203
X-Istence wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because blue means iMessage and iMessage means E2EE. Grey and Green means not encrypted. Simple.

Gray is encrypted to Apple, and then the information is (of course) shared with third parties. Would you consider that to be a private communication? Kind of. It's a gray area...

C'mon...

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#328

Post by tredre3 »

qingcharles wrote: post #313
no_wizard wrote: post #28

This is something I never thought I'd see. I hope the GSM association moves fast to make robust E2EE a standard required for proper implementation for carriers. That would go a long way in making a huge improvement over SMS/MMS. This is a win for RCS, ultimately. Maybe this will kick carriers into high gear to up their messaging standard support game and have standard interop. I don't think this will lead to a declin…

Hopefully vendors start putting better fallback into their messaging clients when RCS isn't available. It's been terrible for all the poor people I know who rarely have working data on their phones, but RCS enabled by default. They can't figure out why they're not sending or receiving any messages and I have to keep disabling it for them.

If you turn off RCS, Google Messages shows you a full screen prompt once a week to turn it back on. Indefinitely.

And of course the prompt has a large blue button to enable, and a very small text underneath to dismiss, making it easy to accidentally enable it. It happened to me a few times already.

It also tells you nothing about the downsides (that you need a data connection, mainly) that would make RCS unusable to certain people... So they trick users into subscribing then users begin experiencing difficulties receiving or sending texts and they don't understand why.

Thank you, Google.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#329

Post by criddell »

willseth wrote: post #254
criddell wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google added it. I can’t imagine all of the carriers cooperating on key management. That’s probably why some carriers have opted to use Google’s solution instead of their own. I would guess encryption isn’t an option if your carrier isn’t in this group. FWIW, the 350+ page standard is here: https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wp-content/uploads/2019/...

AFAICT Google Messages is simply encrypting the data sent over RCS, i.e. RCS is dumb pipes for the encrypted data, and the carries don't explicitly cooperate one way or another. The consequence would be that only users of Google Messages are able to send and receive encrypted messages to/from Google Messages, not other RCS compatible messaging apps. Pretty ironic given the context.

If a customer of carrier A wants to send a message to a customer of carrier B and the carriers aren't cooperating with key management, then I think the message is not encrypted because customer A needs to know B's public key and when B gets the message, they need A's public key to verify the sender.

Re: Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year

#330

Post by userinanother »

rgbrenner wrote: post #97
edent wrote: post #14

I was working on RCS systems back in 2012. It was the future back them - incredible low latency for messaging and gaming, rich messaging, and a decent SDK. How did carriers fuck it up so badly that, a decade later, it's barely a blip on the messaging landscape? The were so desperate to stop OTT (over the top) services that they... locked everything down in the hope that customers wouldn't churn. It backfired spectacu…

Reminder to everyone who wonders why WhatsApp and iMessage won: US phone carriers used to charge $0.10 to $0.25 per message. Yes, it was as ridiculous as it sounds. There used to be news articles about kids racking up hundreds of dollars on their phone bill. Here's one from the same year the iphone was released: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/0...

By the time I message became big it was a non issue. SMS is a garbage standard in comparison. I send full pictures and movies via I message if there is a Android phone on the chat they all turn to garbage tiny images
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